Open access: community over commercialisation
In honour of International Open Access (OA) Week, which started yesterday, the open access team is starting this blog up once again, reviving it after having laid dormant for the past year. Given the time of year, then, I wanted to touch on just a few open access-related items.
First, what is open access? If you’re on this page, you probably know, and may even be vaguely insulted that I’ve asked you. You may have some OA funding requirements you need to comply with, and you’ve been combing Open Research’s pages, desperately trying to find the right advice, and you stumbled on this blog, flummoxed and frustrated that I’m not answering that very specific question you have about article processing charges or what kind of agreement we might have with Springer Nature or what is the difference between an author accepted manuscript and a final version of record.
Fair enough. If we aren’t answering your question on our pages, then please reach out!
But a few weeks ago, though, I attended the welcome reception for this year’s new batch of postgraduate students, and while many were well-acquainted with open access, there were many others who hadn’t an inkling as to what OA might be.
I repeat, then, what is open access?
I like the brief but helpful definition given on the Open Access Week page itself, which defines open access as ‘the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need.’
There are numerous ways to open access publishing, including publishers who offer direct open access routes, and the possibility of simply depositing an accepted manuscript on Pure, depending on publisher permissions or the rights retained by authors.
Whatever you do, it is almost always possible to publish open access, making your research readily, and easily available to whomever wishes to access and learn from it, opening the academic conversation up to beyond these stony walls.
Open access week
To celebrate and learn about open access, we have International Open Access Week.
This year’s OA Week has the theme of community over commercialisation, which is carried over from last year. This repeated refrain is not for lack of creativity, of course, but rather to continue highlighting the necessity of its message, particularly for how open access might progress and develop.
Community over commercialisation acts as a theme for the week, but also a sort of guiding light for the decisions we make as we choose which venue to publish in, choosing to foreground where the academic community might be and our place in it, over more commercial concerns.
Community over commercialisation acts as an optimistic hope for the future, as we support journals and publishers who are doing good, open access work, and who care more about the academic conversation than whatever profits might be yielded in publishing. Hopefully these can gain the kind of footing and capital that larger publishers hold like buried treasure.
Community over commercialisation acts as a reminder too, of just what research is—a conversation, taking place in both local and international contexts, rather than strictly a transaction or series of deposits and withdrawals. Open research is poised to include more folks in that conversation, bringing in more perspectives that can potentially enrich the dialogue.
We’ve answered the what, and perhaps a bit of the why. But the reasons for choosing open access changes depending on your discipline, as well as the kind of material you are putting together.
Humanities scholars have different needs and economic realities than science academics, just as journal articles have different expectations and requirements than monographs or other long-form projects.
This week, we are going to release two more posts.
The first will go over some of the reasons for choosing open access when publishing, focusing particularly on the challenges and potential solutions for researchers in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.
After that, we’ll focus on open access books, who is publishing them, the costs involved, and other developments in the sector.
I hope you’ll follow along, and either way, a happy Open Access week to you!